


choose your own path that you walk with great care

by badritual



Series: Author's Favorites [22]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Don't copy to another site, Fix-It of Sorts, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Forging One's Own Destiny, Gen, Not Beta Read, Not Canon Compliant - Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey Nobody
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:15:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22100071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badritual/pseuds/badritual
Summary: She can still feel them—the Jedi—within her. Whispering softly to her.
Relationships: Rey & Anakin Skywalker
Series: Author's Favorites [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/665036
Comments: 11
Kudos: 106





	choose your own path that you walk with great care

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure what the space camel at the end of TROS is actually called so I went with an eopie. 
> 
> This is definitely not a new idea, lol. Enjoy!
> 
> Title from "Stayin' Alive," by Magnum.

Rey sets the _Falcon_ down amidst the swirling sands of Tatooine, not too far from the moisture farm where Master Skywalker grew up. When she peers out one of the viewports, her eyes land on a row of sun-bleached markers, on which names are engraved in Aurebesh: _Shmi, Cliegg, Owen, Beru_. 

Rey’s chest tightens as something like grief passes over her. They had been Anakin Skywalker’s family. 

The Chosen One.

Rey turns in the captain’s seat and grabs her satchel. The bag is heavy with the weight of the lightsabers, clanging together with metallic twangs and thunks. She sets it in her lap as she takes a moment to gaze out the viewport at the unending stretch of sand before her. 

She’d grown to despise sand, but this sand feels different to her than Jakku’s. 

_Welcome home_ , she imagines the shifting sands of Tatooine whisper to her. 

Rey reaches into the bag and draws out one of the lightsabers. Leia’s. She rolls it in her palm, hefting it, though she doesn’t dare ignite it. 

Leia hadn’t had fond memories of Tatooine and really, neither had Luke. Rey thought she might take Leia’s ’saber to Naboo, or even New Alderaan, and Luke’s to Dagobah, but she couldn’t bear the thought of splitting them up. 

So she’s brought them here, to Tatooine, to a place neither Skywalker really considered _home_.

It’s an odd compromise, she knows. But at least they’ll be together, after years spent apart.

Rey tucks Leia’s ’saber back in her bag and slings the strap over her shoulder. BB-8 chirps at her and knocks gently against her leg with its dome.

Rey smiles down at the droid and gives its crooked antenna an affectionate tweak. “I don’t think Poe would have liked to come with us,” she says, with a soft laugh. “I can’t imagine he has great memories of sand planets.”

BB-8 whirrs at her, questioningly, tilting its round glossy dome up as if to look her in the eyes.

“I don’t think Finn likes sand very much either, Bee-Bee,” she says, giving BB-8 a pat. “Now, let’s go.”

*** 

The Lars homestead is rather inhospitable, though Rey supposes that might be more a reflection on its dilapidated state than anything else. When she touches various items that had been left behind—pots, pans, bedrolls, broken pottery, scraps of flimsi, children’s toys—she can feel the love of the people who’d once lived here. 

She wanders into what had once been a child’s room. There are broken toys scattered on the ground: cloth dolls coming apart at the seams, a toy bantha missing one of its legs, a one-eyed pilot doll in full orange flight suit and cracked plasteel helmet.

Rey crouches down and scoops up the doll, cradling it in her hands. It reminds her of the little doll— _Dosmit_ —that she’d stitched together with bits of straw, a torn flight suit, and cloth as a child. The doll that had once been her only friend. 

When she brushes her fingers over the toy pilot’s shattered visor, a surge of feeling prickles through her fingertips and into her veins. 

Anger. Frustration. Love. Envy.

_—looks like I’m going nowhere._

She sees a boy her age, a shock of blond hair, eyes as blue as the skies over Ahch-To. 

Rey gasps and the little doll slips out of her hand, landing on the cracked stone in a heap. 

The plasteel helmet flies off, revealing the doll’s shattered face.

“Oh no.” Rey drops down to her knees and gathers the doll back into her hands, eyes stinging with tears of shame.

Rey closes her eyes and lets a hand rest over the broken doll, but nothing happens. The pieces don’t mend themselves as Ben Solo’s jagged, burnt skin and sinew and bone had mended themselves at her command. She’s a long ways away from the ruins of Kef Bir.

A single tear rolls down her cheek and splashes over the doll’s shattered face. 

Sniffling, Rey swipes the back of her hand across her wet eyes. She tenderly tucks the broken doll into the satchel slung over her shoulder.

This had been Master Skywalker’s room. She can feel his emotions baked into the stone walls. So much love, anger, and envy still linger. 

He’d felt trapped on Tatooine as she’d felt trapped on Jakku, but for different reasons. Luke had wanted adventure, had wanted to follow after his friends. Rey had been trapped, waiting for people who—it turns out—were never coming back for her. 

Rey sits on the end of Luke’s bed and closes her eyes, resting her hands loosely over her knees. 

She can still feel them—the Jedi—within her. Whispering softly to her. Their voices are braided into one, indistinct, nothing more than a low hum. 

One voice pulls away, a loose strand.

“ _Tatooine was my home too_ ,” it whispers at her, softly, sounding a tinge regretful. 

Rey opens her eyes. 

A figure outlined in blue stands before her. But it’s not Master Skywalker. She’s never seen this Jedi before. 

“Who are…” Rey starts, but the words dissolve on the tip of her tongue.

She’s never met this Jedi before but she knows who he is. His voice has been the loudest of the whispers in her soul. The most powerful of the Jedi who came to her on Exegol. There’s only one Chosen One.

“ _You already know_ ,” he says.

Anakin moves closer, his robes dragging—but not quite—over the sand and stone, to stand before her. 

“Master Skywalker,” she murmurs. 

“ _That was my son_ ,” he says, offering her a slim smile. “ _You can call me Anakin_.”

He settles next to her on Luke’s old bed without a sound, and when she looks over at him she realizes she can see through him. Anakin smoothes translucent hands over glowing robes.

“Master Anakin,” she says, clasping her hands in her lap to hide their shaking. “Where do I go from here? What do I do?”

Anakin chuckles lightly. “ _Much has been laid upon your shoulders, young one,_ ” he says. He turns keen eyes on her. “ _You wanted a legacy. A family. You longed to be a part of this vast, cosmic story. And now that you are, you don’t know if you can carry the weight._ ”

Rey glances away, cheeks flaring with heat at being so easily read. And by a Force ghost, no less. “It isn’t what I expected,” she admits, tearing at the cuticle of her thumb, savagely. “I thought I might have been Han and Leia’s. I _wanted_ to be Han and Leia’s.”

Anakin reaches out, letting his pale ghostly hand lay over hers. “ _You **were**. For the brief time they knew you, you were. You still are. Didn’t Luke tell you that family isn’t only defined by blood?_”

Rey nods slowly. “Yes, but…” She draws in a deep breath, then lets it go. “But I’m a _Palpatine_. I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I can carry the weight of that name.”

“ _You are stronger than you think_ ,” he says. “ _You carry the weight of a thousand generations of Jedi within you now_.”

Rey sighs. “Sometimes I wish he’d never told me. Sometimes… Sometimes I wish I’d truly been a nobody.”

Anakin sighs too. It sounds like the wind and sand currently battering against the stone walls of this desolate, abandoned place. “ _You are whoever you choose to be_ ,” he says. “ _A name, a family doesn’t define you. It is your actions that do._ ”

Anakin fades away so quietly it isn’t until she turns to ask him another question that she realizes he’s gone. 

*** 

Rey wraps the lightsabers and buries them outside the Lars homestead, not too far from the grave markers. She feels a soft sigh within her soul, an unlatching. A letting go. 

Rey unclips her own ’saber—fashioned from her quarterstaff—off her belt and holds it up to the sinking suns of Tatooine. She ignites it and a beam of yellow light burns brightly against a backdrop of rose and gold. 

“There’s been no one for so long.” 

Rey extinguishes her ’saber and jumps to her feet. An old woman stands in front of her, one hand resting on the flank of her eopie. For a moment, Rey sees the face of the old scavenger she worked with in Niima. 

A whisper floats through her mind: _I have lived long enough to see the same eyes in different people._

Rey shakes the voice out of her head and offers the old woman a smile.

“Who are you?” she asks, her eyes sharp, almost knowing.

Rey opens her mouth to respond, _Rey Palpatine_ ready to spill off her lips. Then she stops. It still doesn’t feel right. She imagines putting on the Palpatine name like a jacket, picturing it all ill-fitting and uncomfortable. 

She isn’t ready to be a Palpatine. She might _never_ be ready to claim the Palpatine name, and all that comes with it.

It wouldn’t feel right to take the Skywalker name either. She’d loved Luke and Leia as if they were her own family. She even still feels some sort of kinship to Ben, the last of the Skywalkers, but… 

But she’s not a Skywalker either. 

She tips her chin up. “Rey.”

“Rey _who_?” 

Rey turns, feeling them more than seeing them at first. Luke and Leia step forward slowly, as if out of a swirling mist. And not too far behind them is Ben. He doesn’t come too close, and she wonders if he’s afraid to. When she reaches out through her feelings, though, she doesn’t sense lingering fear or resentment. Only peace. Purpose. All three of them watch over her, silently. Waiting.

A soft breeze caresses her cheek, carrying Anakin’s voice with it. _You can choose who you are meant to be_.

Rey turns back to the old woman, who waits expectantly. “I’m just Rey.”


End file.
